Since the advent of the personal computer, a number of on-line services have come into being. To use an on-line service, the subscriber establishes a communications link to the provider of the on-line service over a communications line. A communications line is an electronic highway between two computers. The communications line can include, but is not limited to, modem phone line dial-up, X.25 networks, frame relay networks, ATM networks, TCP/IP networks, IPX networks, infrared networks, television cable and wireless cellular systems.
Once the communications link is established, the subscriber can communicate with the host system, which provides the on-line services. The host system can comprise, for example, a mainframe computer, a network of smaller computers, or even a single personal computer.
The range of features provided by existing on-line services is diverse. Large on-line services, such as COMPUSERVE, provide news and weather information, games, electronic mail, forums, chat lines and on-line shopping. Smaller services, such as Dow Jones News Retrieval, may only supply a small subset of those features. Bulletin board systems (BBSs) are designed to provide on-line services to a much smaller number of subscribers. In many cases, the BBSs are focused toward a particular subject matter or to a particular set of people, such as members of a club or employees of a company. For example, a software developer may have a BBS to provide product support for customers . A BBS of this nature will generally have electronic mail and file upload/download capabilities.
In general, a BBS has fewer capabilities and features available to its subscribers relative to larger on-line systems. Because a single BBS is generally designed to service a limited number of subscribers, it is not possible for a single BBS to provide certain features such as stock information, news retrieval or weather reports which may be offered by a larger on-line service. Another problem with BBSs and smaller on-line services is the time and effort needed to maintain the on-line service. While a number of software packages exist for implementing the BBS on a personal computer, the time required to customize the BBS to a certain configuration is significant. Further, a number of hardware or software problems may arise during operation of the BBS which require on-site human intervention to restart the system. Hence, for on-line services systems which must remain operational at all times, full-time human supervision is necessary.
Yet another problem with smaller on-line services is billing. While some services can bill through the telephone company using a 900 service or similar plan, such pricing is inflexible and may discourage membership in the service. Maintaining billing locally is once again time-consuming and costly to the owner of the on-line service.
Therefore, a need has arisen for a on-line service which may be configured to provide dedicated features to a small group of users while having a robust set of features and capabilities and reduced maintenance and billing capabilities for service providers.